Over the next hundred million years, these transparent “bubbles” continued to grow larger and larger, eventually merging and causing the entire universe to become transparent. Webb’s data shows that these relatively tiny galaxies drove reionization, clearing massive regions of space around them. These regions of transparent gas are gigantic compared to the galaxies – imagine a hot air balloon with a pea suspended inside. “With Webb’s data, we are seeing galaxies reionize the gas around them.” “Not only does Webb clearly show that these transparent regions are found around galaxies, we’ve also measured how large they are,” explained Daichi Kashino of Nagoya University in Japan, the lead author of the team’s first paper. The new results effectively pull back the curtain at the end of this reionization period. Researchers have long sought definitive evidence to explain these transformations. Then, the universe hit “repeat.” The gas again became hot and ionized – likely due to the formation of early stars in galaxies, and over millions of years, became transparent. Over hundreds of millions of years, the gas cooled. After the big bang, gas in the universe was incredibly hot and dense. The results, from a research team led by Simon Lilly of ETH Zürich in Switzerland, are the newest insights about a time period known as the Era of Reionization, when the universe underwent dramatic changes. Why? New data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has pinpointed the reason: The galaxies’ stars emitted enough light to heat and ionize the gas around them, clearing our collective view over hundreds of millions of years. But 1 billion years after the big bang, the gas had become completely transparent. We even found large carbonaceous molecules in this object, and we have no clear idea how they got there, yet.In the early universe, the gas between stars and galaxies was opaque – energetic starlight could not penetrate it. “Beyond the morphological treasure trove, there is also much information on the chemical makeup of the gas and dust in these observations. She is a professor of physics and astronomy at Western’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration. “The structure in this object is incredible, and to think that this is all created by just one dying star,” said astrophysicist Els Peeters, a core member of the JWST Ring Nebula Imaging Project, in a statement. Each chemical element creates a specific color, allowing astronomers to study the evolution of the star.Īnd astronomers still have questions about the different processes that take place within planetary nebulae. The star’s radiation interacts with the elements that have already been released, causing them to glow. We can use the Ring Nebula as our laboratory to study how planetary nebulae form and evolve.” “We are witnessing the final chapters of a star’s life, a preview of the Sun’s distant future so to speak, and JWST’s observations have opened a new window into understanding these awe-inspiring cosmic events. The high-resolution images not only showcase the intricate details of the nebula’s expanding shell but also reveal the inner region around the central white dwarf in exquisite clarity,” said Mike Barlow, University College London professor emeritus of physics and astronomy and colead scientist of the JWST Ring Nebula Imaging Project, in a statement. “The James Webb Space Telescope has provided us with an extraordinary view of the Ring Nebula that we’ve never seen before. The nebula was created as a dying star, called a white dwarf, began shedding its outer layers into space, creating a complex structure of glowing rings and expanding clouds of gas. “Scientifically, I am very interested to learn how a star turns its gaseous envelope into this mixture of simple and complex molecules and dust grains, and these new observations will help us figure that out.” He is a professor of physics and astronomy at the Western University’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration in London, Ontario. I would never have thought that one day, I would be part of the team that would use the most powerful space telescope ever built, to look at this object,” said astrophysicist Jan Cami, a core member of the JWST Ring Nebula Imaging Project, in a statement. “I first saw the Ring Nebula as a kid through just a small telescope. Webb telescope spots water in a nearby planetary system This is the first detection of water in the terrestrial region of a disk already known to host two or more protoplanets, one of which is shown at upper right. New measurements by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have detected water vapor at distances of less than 100 million miles from the star - the region where rocky, terrestrial planets may be forming. This artist's concept portrays the star PDS 70 and its inner protoplanetary disk.
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